Firefly Pros & Cons: What Nobody Tells You [2026]

Firefly connects to your cloud providers using read-only permissions and automatically scans all regions and accounts to discover resources. It maps relationships between resources and identifies unmanaged assets that exist outside your infrastructure-as-code. The discovery process uses cloud provider APIs to enumerate all resource types including compute, storage, networking, and security services.

Firefly requires read-only access to your cloud accounts with permissions to list and describe resources but cannot modify or delete anything. The specific permissions required include resource enumeration rights across all services, cost and billing data access, and configuration metadata reading. Detailed permission requirements are documented for each cloud provider integration.

Yes, Firefly provides comprehensive cost optimization recommendations including unused resource identification, right-sizing suggestions based on actual usage patterns, and reserved instance optimization. It quantifies potential savings with dollar amounts, provides implementation guidance, and tracks optimization impact over time with detailed ROI reporting.

Firefly integrates with Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and other IaC tools to identify drift between your code and actual cloud state. It can generate IaC templates for unmanaged resources to bring them under governance control and provides CI/CD pipeline integrations for governance gates and policy enforcement.

Firefly provides SOC 2 Type II compliance, encrypted data transmission, and role-based access controls. It helps with compliance frameworks like CIS benchmarks, AWS Well-Architected Framework, and custom organizational policies by continuously monitoring configurations and alerting to violations.